Category: sustainable development

And I'm back . . .

OK, page proofs are done.  Index is mostly done . . . well, it is out of my hands, anyway.  Jacket copy approved.  Happy blurbs from Mickey Glantz and Andrew Rice secured for the jacket.  Nice author photo for the jacket taken (by Scott).  Yep, pretty much done here . . . which means I can now get back to hassling the internet.  Wheeeee!
To celebrate, I bring you a completely unfair piece of insanity.  I know I come to this late, but this is so nuts I simply could not let it go.  Well, that and this may have a direct impact on my work life in the very near future . . . that’s right, it’s the battle for leadership of the House Energy and Commerce Committee!  And why, you ask, does a fairly esoteric battle for what seems to be a marginal committee (it’s not) rise to my attention?  Because one of the candidates, John Shimkus, is arguing that while climate change is real, we don’t have to do anything about it because, and I quote:

“I do believe in the Bible as the final word of God,” Shimkus said. “And I do believe that God said the Earth would not be destroyed by a flood” (via Politico)

By flood, I presume he means sea-level rise.  And by Earth, I can only presume he means his great state of Illinois, which is a hell of a long way from the nearest ocean (though Great Lakes rise could cause serious problems for Chicago).  I suspect there are a bunch of people in low-lying parts of Bangladesh and Vietnam, as well as a number of island states like Tuvalu, who are pretty much looking down the barrel of the world being destroyed by flood who might take issue with this particular mashup of climate science and the Bible, regardless of their religious background.
Holy crap.
This is old Bjorn Lomborg read through Genesis (new Bjorn Lomborg has reconsidered the math, and now thinks we should do something, though it is mostly adaptation) . . . and Rep. Shimkus might have some influence over the use of federal aid dollars for climate change work.
Look, it is one thing to debate those parts of the science that are not settled (a relatively small amount), and further to debate what to do about the impacts of what is already happening, and what is very likely to happen . . . but it is entirely another to announce that we don’t have to worry about such impacts at all because, even though climate change is real, God will save us.  History is littered with the bodies of people who waited for God to save them.  God helps those who help themselves – not those who sit around waiting for miracles . . . but it seems Rep. Shimkus’ reading of the Bible didn’t quite make it to the New Testament.

Posted on by Ed 1

Page proofs . . .

are killing me.  But, the book is here, and I am cleaning it up.  I hate page proofs.  Deeply.  This is the sort of detail work I loathe – combing back through 90,000 words looking for misspellings and erroneous punctuation.  It is taking days, because you can only focus that hard for so long.  And at the same time, I am cleaning up the index.
Oh, and that is on top of the article that was due back in today – I worked with two of my Ph.D. students, Mary Thompson and Manali Baruah, to produce a paper that examines how REDD+ functions as a form of unacknowledged environmental governance (defining legitimate terms and actors within debates over how to implement terrestrial carbon sequestration projects in forest areas).  We’ll see how it does in this round of peer review.
And then there is the talk I am supposed to be giving at UNC – Chapel Hill on Friday.  I’ll be discussing how we think about livelihoods in development, how current framings might have carried us as far as they are going to, and what a new framing might look like.  Yeah, it is coming together, but not as quickly as I’d hoped.
But, without further ado, the first few hundred words of Delivering Development:

Posted on by Ed 0

Well, maybe . . .

UNDP has launched its 20th anniversary edition of the Human Development Report.  In the report, they argue that development is working better than we realize – and use this to argue that aid is therefore working better than people think.  However, there is an important caveat in the report which calls this general claim into question.  As the BBC reports “There has been most progress in the areas of health and education, sectors which have received most focus in development assistance.”
This is a huge caveat.  These are the sectors that are easiest to measure – at least through traditional indicators.  Development programs have been designing programs around clear indicators and pumping money into achieving those indicators for some time – the same indicators used by the human development report.  Of course literacy rates are up.  Of course life expectancy is up.  These are low-hanging fruit.  But what does this really mean for the quality of life of people living in the Global South?  Are they living better, happier lives?  Or are they living longer, in greater misery than ever before?  Are any of these gains sustainable, or are they predicated on continual flows of aid?  There is no answer here – and it is an answer we need to obtain not through indicators, but by getting out there and talking to those we intend to help with development.  Get on your boots, and get out of the SUV/Mission Office!
I do, however, like that this report is trying to make an evidence-based case for the persistence of market failures around public goods.  We have seen, time and again, that when governments fail to provide security, access to healthcare, and education for their populations, the markets DO NOT step in to fill the gap.  A lot of poor, vulnerable people get left behind.  (Given recent trends and this week’s election results, it is entirely likely that South Carolina will empirically demonstrate this  can happen even here in the US, at least in the area of education, over the next four years).

Posted on by Ed 0

Shouldn't accounting rules apply to everyone?

Hoorah!  The World Bank is officially recognizing that environmental impacts are an example of a colossal market failure, and moving aggressively to get the cost of these impacts built into country’s national accounts.  To quote World Bank President Robert Zoellick:

“We know that human well-being depends on ecosystems and biodiversity,” said Mr Zoellick.

“We also know they’re degrading at an alarming rate.

“One of the causes is our failure to properly value ecosystems and all they do for us – and the solution therefore lies in taking full account of our ecosystem services when countries make policies.”

Well, super.  We’ll see how this goes over when a bunch of countries see the accounts they use for planning head into the toilet – my guess is massive pushback from countries that can (China, India, pretty much the entire Global North), which means the only countries that will be forced to deal with this revaluation are those in the Global South too small to resist World Bank pressure.  Enforcing this change in accounting unevenly will be remarkably unfair, if this is how it plays out.  Think I’m a bit alarmist?  Continue reading the article, right down at the end:

The draft agreement ministers are considering in the main negotiations here calls for “the values of biodiversity” to be integrated into countries’ development and poverty reduction strategies.

But delegates are still arguing over whether to call for integration into national accounts.

Only developing countries have to create poverty reduction strategies and development strategies.  So if these values are used in these strategies, but not in national accounts more widely, we are going to be hitting the poorest countries pretty hard while doing nothing ourselves.
However, there is a larger problem here – the valuing of everything via markets.  While this is an interesting effort, neither the science nor the economics are very well worked out, so the value of many ecosystem services (the goods and processes we get from ecosystems) is hard to calculate.  So, will we end up only dealing with this in ecosystems where the economics and science is further along (forests, for example – and temperate forests, at that)?  Or will we risk arbitrary valuations that lead to their own kinds of market failures?  The first option runs into the uneven enforcement problem I raised above – not every country has well-understood forests, so only some countries would have to deal with this revaluation.  The second is not an improvement on the current situation – indeed, it would give us the false impression we know what we are doing, when we do not.
Watch this space . . .

Posted on by Ed 1

When business people assume they can do climate vulnerability analysis . . .

things often go wrong.  Take, for example, the climate change vulnerability index produced by Maplecroft.  At first glance, this looks interesting – a scale of risk that can be mapped to visually represent the levels of challenge presented by climate change to any particular place.

© MapleCroft

However, look more closely and it becomes clear that the product isn’t really useful at all.  Anybody who takes 42 variables and aggregates them into a single category (vulnerability) has created something sort of useless.  OK, so the vulnerability is high.  But vulnerability to what?  Flood, drought, crop failure due to temperature, coastal fisheries collapse?  All of these things are problems related to climate change, but they are not present in all places at all times, and they all have different impacts on people (and Maplecroft should probably note that they have different impacts on investments) that require different interventions.  So the index does not tell you anything diagnostic about this vulnerability.  It is, at best, a first step to thinking about vulnerability and how to address it.
On top of overselling the product and its value, their underlying data is problematic – if you download the map you can see the size of the grid they used for the data – it is huge.  This suggests that they have used global circulation models (GCMs) for their climate projection variables.  The use of global scale data in local cases is highly problematic – downscaling these models to regional or even local levels has proven very difficult because the factors that most influence the global climate are not necessarily the most important factors at regional or local scales.  For example, local deforestation can have a huge impact on local precipitation patterns over time without having a very large impact on global circulation as a whole – so the downscaled model (focused on global circulation) will not capture the importance of this local factor in determining local climate outcomes.  Just looking at Ghana on their free map (you can download a copy from the page above), I can tell you that they have missed a really distressing trend toward the loss of the minor rainy season in the forest (Southern) areas of Ghana . . . which is going to have a massive impact on both cocoa production (national economic impact) and rain-fed agriculture.  If they got this wrong, I am guessing they have missed a hell of a lot of other things.
This is what happens when the business community starts jonesing for climate change, but won’t go to the scientific community to get solid advice on how to get the information they need.  Look at Maplecroft’s core team – only one of the six has really engaged with climate change or global environmental change more broadly in any meaningful way – and he is trained in Business Studies, not climatology, biogeography, ecology, anthropology, political ecology or any other number of fields that produce the people who develop basic knowledge on climate change, environmental change and their related human impacts.  In short, they really don’t know what they are talking about, but they have made a nice looking product that might mislead people into thinking that they do.
What drives my concern here is not some sort of academic/governmental territoriality.  When people approach the issue of climate change and its human impacts without a serious consideration of the science behind these broad issues, there is the potential for very serious problems.  You should see the REDD+-related business proposals circulating out there . . . I’ve seen crazy stuff, like people wanting to plant genetically-modified super-fast-growing eucalypts in the swamps around the Amazon to enhance carbon uptake in otherwise not-so-forested areas, without the slightest consideration for the ecological impact of such a species (which would, according to my biogeography colleagues, surely go invasive immediately).  Without meaning to, people might end up doing a hell of a lot more damage than good if they just run off willy-nilly.
There are a lot of us out here who would love to work with you – we want to help, and we’ve already made a lot of these mistakes.  Let us save you time, and save the folks suffering these vulnerabilities a lot of unnecessary pain.

Posted on by Ed 2

Are we really that bad?

So, the Center for Global Development, a non-partisan think tank focused on reducing poverty and making globalization work for the poor (a paraphrase of their mission statement, which can be found here), has issued a report that more or less says that USAID’s quality and effectiveness of aid is very low when compared to other agencies.
Well, I’m not all that freaked out by this assessment, principally because it fails to ask important questions relevant to understanding development needs and development outcomes.  In fact, the entire report is rigged – not intentionally, mind you, but I suspect out of a basic ignorance of the difference between the agencies being evaluated, and an odd (mis)understanding of what development is.
For me, the most telling point in the report came right away, on pages 3 and 4:

Given these difficulties in relating aid to development impact on the ground, the scholarly literature on aid effectiveness has failed to convince or impress those who might otherwise spend more because aid works (as in Sachs 2005) or less because aid doesn’t work often enough (Easterly 2003).

Why did this set me off?  Well, in my book I argue that the “poles” of Sachs and Easterly in the development literature are not poles at all – they operate from the same assumptions about how development and globalization work, and I just spent 90,000 words worth of a book laying out those assumptions and why they are often wrong.  In short, this whole report is operating from within the development echo chamber from which this blog takes its name.  But then they really set me off:

In donor countries especially, faced with daunting fiscal and debt problems, there is new and healthy emphasis on value for money and on maximizing the impact of their aid spending.

Folks, yesterday I posted about how the desire to get “value for our money” in development was putting all the wrong pressures on agencies . . . not because value is bad, but because it puts huge pressures on the development agencies to avoid risk (and associated costs), which in turn chokes off innovation in their programs and policies.  And here we have a report, evaluating the quality of aid (their words) in terms of its cost-effectiveness.  One of their four pillar analyses is the ability of agencies to maximize aid efficiency.  This is nuts.
Again, its not that there should be no oversight of the funds or their uses, or that there should be no accountability for those uses.  But to demand efficiency is to largely rule out high risk efforts which could have huge returns but carry a significant risk of failure.  Put another way, if this metric was applied to the Chilean mine rescue, then it would score low for efficiency because they tried three methods at once and two failed.  Of course, that overlooks the fact that they GOT THE MINERS OUT ALIVE.  Same thing for development – give me an “inefficient” agency that can make transformative leaps forward in our understandings of how development works and how to improve the situation of the global poor over the “efficient” agency that never programs anything of risk, and never makes those big leaps.
Now, let’s look at the indicators – because they tell the same story.  One of the indicators under efficiency is “Share of allocation to well-governed countries.”  Think about the pressure that places on an agency that has to think about where to set up its programming.  What about all of the poor, suffering people in poorly-governed countries?  Is USAID not supposed to send massive relief to Haiti after an earthquake because its government is not all we might hope?  This indicator either misses the whole point of development as a holistic, collaborative process of social transformation, or it is a thinly-veiled excuse to start triaging countries now.
They should know better – Andrew Natsios is one of their fellows, and he has explained how these sorts of evaluation pressures choke an agency to death.  Amusingly, they cite this work in here . . . almost completely at random on page 31, for a point that has no real bearing on that section of the text.  I wonder what he thinks of this report . . .
In the end, USAID comes out 126th of 130 agencies evaluated for “maximizing efficiency.”  Thank heavens.  It probably means that we still have some space to experiment and fail left.  Note that of the top 20% of donors, the highest scores went to the World Bank and UN Agencies, arguably the groups that do the least direct programming on the ground – in other words, the “inefficiencies” of their work are captured elsewhere, when the policies and programs they set up for others to run begin to come apart.  The same could be said of the Millennium Challenge Corporation here in the US, which also scored high.  In other words, they are rewarding the agencies that don’t actually do all that much on the ground for their efficiency, while the agencies that actually have to deal with the uncertainties of real life get dinged for it.
And the Germans ended up ranking high, but hey, nothing goes together like Germans and efficiency.  That one’s for you, Daniel Esser.
What a mess of a report . . . and what a mess this will cause in the press, in Congress, etc.  For no good reason.

Posted on by Ed 0

Jeff Sachs, please shut up (redux)

The Center for Global Development becomes the latest to figure out that the Millennium Villages are not producing meaningful information about their accomplishments . . . because they are not working.  I’m not a huge fan of finding new metrics to test this argument – the simple fact is this: when a project stops releasing its data, you can pretty much be assured the data is not telling the story they want.  But then, this was all completely predictable.
Folks, Jeff Sachs won’t learn anything until you stop paying attention to him and he is forced to consider why nobody is listening anymore.  Do it for him, if not for the global poor.

Posted on by Ed 2

An end and a beginning for sustainable development

The WWF has just released its 2010 Living Planet Report (download a copy here).  The big headline, being run by all the news organizations, is that we “need to find another Earth”.  The headline is attention-grabbing, but misses the real issue here.  In several posts on this blog I’ve referenced the fact that we need about three Earths worth of resources to allow everyone to live at the standard of consumption of the average person in the US.  Implicit in this measurement has been the fact that we here in the US (and in Europe, Australia, Japan, parts of China, parts of India, etc.) can go on consuming as we do just so long as the other 4-odd billion people don’t consume much at all.  This is the part of sustainable development nobody likes to talk about – there are two ways to achieve it: either cutbacks on the consumption of those who consume the most until consumption at a fairly high level is available for all (how most people tend to think of it) or just keep a hell of a lot of people really, really poor so that a small minority can just go on consuming (de facto, this is the choice that we’ve made up to this point – that’s right, if you are reading this blog, you live the way you do because 4 billion people cannot).

Well, this report now throws a bit of a wrench into the ugly, unacknowledged path we have chosen – turns out that our current levels of consumption will not be sustainable past the next 20 years no matter how many people we impoverish.  Our global population and consumption figures are simply too high.  That’s right, by 2020 we’d better have figured out how to get twice as much resource out of this planet as we do now.  I don’t see that happening.
I don’t think this means the revolution is coming anytime soon – I think the steadily rising inequality we see here in the US will eventually be mirrored by similar patterns across the advanced economies, as a smaller and smaller group of people cling to their privileges.  Further, the whole two Earths in 20 years argument is a bit overstated, as they work in carbon sinks and other regulating services from ecosystems that are not completely understood and therefore sometimes more resilient than expected, and are often fungible with other resources and biophysical processes.  But if the WWF is right (it is too early to say for sure), we are shifting into an era where our choices for how to achieve sustainable development narrow to one: reducing consumption.  Then we will have new choices – who reduces, and how?

Posted on by Ed 1

We're not all that powerful, really . . . and Jeff Sachs, please shut up. Please.

I somehow missed this NY Times article on our impending failure to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  Hey, it was my first week at work.  In any case, a few thoughts on a topic that should be getting more discussion.
As I’ve told my classes time and again, the MDGs are the sort of thing that everyone can embrace.  The NYTimes gets it right:

For all the bitter debates pitting nations against one another, there is conspicuously little disagreement over the United Nations goal of eliminating dire poverty. Virtually none of the countries that signed onto the endeavor in 2000 faults the idea of eradicating hunger, educating children, improving maternal health or combating disease. It would be like opposing mother’s milk.

Ah, but saying you want to eliminate suffering, and actually doing it, are two different things.  And at the end of the day, we have two big problems.  First, we live in a finite world where some of us consume so much that it creates real challenges for the rest to get to comfort, if not affluence.  Put another way, if we want everyone to live at an average American standard, we need to come up with between 2-3 Earths worth of resources (see posts here and here).  So, there is no way to achieve the MDGs without making hard choices . . . which leads to my second point: the rich countries do not feel an impetus to make these hard choices.  At least for now, poverty/hunger/suffering are things that happen to large numbers of people somewhere else (we conveniently forget our own poverty belts, like Appalachia and the inner cities) for the average policymaker – we’ll just build really high walls to keep all “those people” out.  Big kudos to Esther Duflo for pointing this out:

“If we miss the goals, who is going to punish us?” asked Esther Duflo, a development expert at M.I.T. “Nobody is going to come from Mars and say, ‘You didn’t reach the goals, so we will invade’ — there is no onus.”

But while this open assertion of the problem was necessary, I think Duflo is wrong about the fact nobody is going to punish us . . . well, perhaps not literally wrong.  However, you can only limit the opportunities of the global poor for so long before we start seeing things like ecological collapse in agricultural systems, or the destruction of the rainforests, as the poor are forced into choices they would rather not make.  No wall is high enough to guard against a changing climate or a disrupted global economy.  We’re playing Russian Roulette, only adding shells to the chamber each time we miss easy goals like the MDGs, or fail to act on the changing climate.  No, the aliens may not come to get us . . . there’s no need.  They can just wait until we get ourselves.
Oh, and the Times felt the need to quote Jeff Sachs.  Again.  And he was wrong.  Again.  Jeff Sachs, for God’s sake shut your piehole.  Really.  You are a supremely arrogant man who has wasted his considerable intelligence by not listening to anyone, not reading any economic or development history, and not really learning any of the economic geography you profess to be furthering.  Your brilliant idea for development, the Millennium Village Project, is a failure – I called that one four years ago – and yet you will not shut up.  Will reality ever intrude for you?  For the press?  You are the D-list reality star of development . . . every time we try to look away, you perform the intellectual equivalent of taking off your top and running around, only we’ve seen this show before and nobody cares or wants to see it again.  Put on your shirt and go read something by someone other than yourself, then come talk to us.

Posted on by Ed 4